Jacob Wren - Rich and Poor

1.

The scapegoat department, that party joke I hooked onto for a few golden hours, never came to be. But the basic principle was sound: always have an escape, some way out. This principle has informed all my seemingly unsustainable risks over the years and, within the top tiers of my colleagues, has come to be known either as a ‘limited hangout’ or as ‘positive dominoes.’

A limited hangout is a white lie designed to lead seamlessly into another white lie, which in turn logically evolves into another misleading statement, etc. It is where you hang out, but only for a while, just until you can escape into the next useful half-truth. It is a way of controlling the narrative virtually forever. As soon as one hangout starts to thin, there is always another you can conveniently step into or towards. You are therefore never trapped and never painted into a corner. Positive dominoes works in a similar way: as each domino topples it sets off the next.

What is most important about a limited hangout or positive domino is that you always remember it is only a hangout or domino, never start to believe that it is an actual fact or reality. As you can imagine, at times this leads to certain confusions or even difficulties. One might wonder why I am so forthcoming with trade secrets that might be seen to compromise essential facets of our business procedure, and perhaps also make me appear not so sharp from an ethical standpoint. Let me address these concerns in a few different ways. Firstly, I plan to retire soon. I’m proud of my achievements and certainly not ashamed of my shortcomings. Business is business; it is tough and one must possess almost infinite guile in order to prevail. With everything I’ve done, I am cognizant of the fact that there are others out there doing far worse. More importantly, these revelations (and others you will find in this book) are in and of themselves a kind of limited hangout. They are the things I tell you to distract from other things I may not be revealing. (Or maybe there is nothing else. That is the point: it is impossible to know.) Since what are a few small lies, a few small dominoes, in a global business environment of perpetual scandal and corruption. I firmly believe that, when history compares my habits to the rest, we will come out relatively spotless.

I often judge my top executives by carefully watching how they manoeuvre their way from one domino to the next. In this Emmett was the absolute best. To watch him slip out from an official position and effortlessly slide into the next, even when the contradictions between the two were glaring, with a joke for every step of the way, the room always filled with laughter, was a spectacle of great beauty. One time we were in some nautical mess concerning oil. In the panic of the moment, counting as one of the more severe errors in judgment we have made over the years, we too quickly and clumsily decided that the first domino would be the fact that the captain was drunk. When the captain threatened to sue, and it quickly became obvious it was a lawsuit he could easily win, leaving us wide open to a series of much more expensive litigations, a brief period of public relations chaos ensued, and it was only the quick wits of Emmett, while looking through the list of casualties, that realized all we needed to do was find the highest ranking member of the crew who was both dead and had no immediate relatives. Miraculously this turned out to be the captain’s first assistant, and it was fairly easy for us to admit that at first we had made an unfortunate mistake, that it was actually the assistant who had drunkenly steered the tanker into the rocks.

This domino didn’t last long, but was enough to buy some time, to get us out of a particularly tight spot. And the ease with which Emmett steered us from one position to the next was breathtaking, joking again and again about our own incompetence, how it was we who had made the drunken mistake, how he would check every drawer for the telltale hidden flask, displacing the difficultly from the spill itself to a clerical error in which we somehow managed to think that the first assistant was the captain himself. For anyone watching carefully, it would have been easy to spot the trick but, in such moments of news-frenzy-chaos, it is often the case that no one is watching closely enough. Or at least no one with enough power to break the story. Because, at the end of the day, for everyone involved, the oil must continue to flow. Emmett stayed strong for the entire crisis, working behind the scenes, spinning one clean-up fiasco into the next new brilliant strategy for how to separate crude from water. Of course, we had every intention of cleaning things up to the absolute best of our ability. We only needed to buy ourselves as much time as possible.

As this example illustrates, a limited hangout or positive domino is never an end in itself, only ever a means, in this case to buy us time to figure out how to thoroughly clean up the spill. But time is a precious commodity, perhaps the most precious, and therefore every domino counts.

2.

Afterwards I found myself standing in the parking lot. I don’t know why I was standing in the parking lot. I didn’t know what else to do. I was so angry and lost. I wanted to process everything I had seen and heard but couldn’t. I watched the cars of the shareholders drive away, one after another, back to their houses and their lives. Logic tells me that he won’t walk out into the parking lot, that he has some other way out, a back or side door, but perhaps secretly I am hoping that any moment he will walk by on the way to his car. I have the piano wire in my jacket pocket. I could approach him, shake his hand, congratulate him on another masterful performance. He will be surrounded by bodyguards but maybe there would still be some way for me to get in there. I know this is not a good plan. I will need to come up with something better, more skilful, with careful planning and a touch of strategic genius. But what could that possibly be?

I look up and realize there is another man standing in the parking lot. He is far away from me, right on the other side, as far away from me as possible. And then I have a completely insane thought: if he is standing around in the parking lot, perhaps he is here for the same reasons. Perhaps he also wants to kill that asshole, and then we could work together. When I have insane ideas sometimes I feel I am losing my grip on reality, that my anger has twisted my brain one twist too far, but I suppose there is no harm in having strange thoughts from time to time. And I desperately want to talk to someone. It seems to me like it’s been a hundred years since I’ve had a real conversation. I can barely even remember the last time. I think to myself: already we have one thing in common, we are both eerily stalking the parking lot long after the shareholder meeting has ended. This gives me a way to start. I can ask him why he is standing around. If his answer sounds honest, and if he asks me the same question in return, I realize I might answer honestly as well, how desperately I suddenly want to tell someone of my plan. It’s terrible to have a secret.

I start to walk slowly towards him. As I do so another possibility, far more reasonable, occurs to me: that he is a private security guard paid to watch the parking lot, in fact paid to stop people exactly like me. Then what I might be about to do seems even more insane: admit to a security guard that I am planning to kill the man he’s being paid to protect. As I get closer it is like a hallucination, in that I actually recognize him. There was a section of glossy photos in the middle of the book, many of the photos including a broadly smiling Emmett, and this, the man at the other end of the parking lot, is Emmett. Ten or twenty years older but definitely him. Now he is not smiling and, from reading the book, or at least reading between the lines, I believe I know why. I think: this is my one chance to meet someone completely sympathetic to my goal, someone who also has a reason to want the billionaire dead. Here was a capitalist who knows, from personal experience, that everyone is expendable.